Border City Cup Notes

When the Border City Cup Tournament schedule was announced last month we instantly pointed towards the Saturday afternoon matchup against the Rochester Alliance as a watershed game.

Playing Rochester, considered the premiere team in the State of New York this season and the #6 ranked Midget Minor team in North America by The Scouting News, was considered a measuring stick game for assessing our team at this point in the season.

The results were, needless to say, very encouraging as we crushed Rochester 6-2 in a lopsided game that virtually cemented our team's place on the national landscape as one of the best teams in the United States.

The Good: Team defense (defensemen and forwards) and goaltending this past weekend were outstanding as we surrendered only 6 total goals against in 5 games. Every team we played struggled to generate quality scoring chances and shots against us. Even in our 1-0 semifinal loss to Little Caesars we counted only 4 even strength shots on our net for the entire game with all of those shots coming from outside our defensize zone or just inside our blueline. Our penalty killing continues to be phenomenal ...... which leads to ....

The Bad: While the officiating in the tournament was by every team's account "utterly horrific", we are taking way, way to many penalties, many of which are of the undisciplined or unintelligent variety. While its nice to have a great penalty killing unit, it would be alot nicer not to have to use it so darn often each game. COUNT ON THIS BEING ADDRESSED BEFORE THE WEEKEND.

and

The Ugly: In 17 games this season no team (other Compuware at the Joe Maire) has come close to matching us in shots on goal or scoring chances. However, lack of finishing those shots and scoring chances continues to be our teams #1 achilles heel (note: see "The Bad" above for our #2 achilles heel). We managed only 13 goals scored in 5 games in the Border City Cup with half of those goals coming in the Rochester game. Hopefully its just a matter of time before we start breaking through and finding the back of the net.